Estelle Getty

Character actress who got little work until later life, but then stole the show in the sitcom The Golden Girls

Estelle Getty as Sophia in The Golden Girls: 'I had a terrible white wig, a cardigan and an old handbag'Photo: REUTERS

2:04AM BST 24 Jul 2008

Estelle Getty, who died on Tuesday aged 84, was best-known for her portrayal of Sophia, the intractable, Alzheimic, octogenarian mother in the long-running television programme The Golden Girls, for which she won Emmy and Golden Globe Awards and a total of seven Emmy nominations.

She herself summed up her acting career as follows: "I've played mothers to heroes and mothers to zeroes. I've played Irish mothers, Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, Southern mothers, mothers in plays by Neil Simon and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. I've played mother to everyone but Attila the Hun."

A diminutive 4ft 11ins, as Sophia Petrillo Estelle Getty stole the show from her co-stars with her pithy one-liners. When one of her house-mates, the man-mad Blanche (Rue McClanahan) complains that her life is an open book, Estelle Getty's character responds witheringly: "Your life is an open blouse."

The sitcom, which focused on the lives of four older previously-married women living in a shared sheltered home in Miami, was developed by the NBC television network to appeal to older viewers. The show proved so popular that Estelle Getty was brought back for two spin-off series – Empty Nest and The Golden Palace – in the 1990s.

In her private life, too, Estelle Getty had a reputation for witty one-liners, though she claimed she was only a "teensy weensy" bit like Sophia Petrillo. "I think people have me mixed up with my character," she told an interviewer in 1993. "I would like to be as sure and magnanimous and feisty and strong and indomitable as she is."

Estelle Getty was the first to admit that she came to stardom at a time when most actresses think of retiring.

She had earlier been an unknown character player, and had worked as a Yiddish comedienne in the "Borscht Belt" of the Catskills. A role, as an archetypal Jewish mother, in Torch Song Trilogy brought her to the attention of the producers of The Golden Girls. "Suddenly I was hot," she recalled. "I did movies, TV, everything I could. Luckily at my age I don't need much sleep".

The only real disappointment in Estelle Getty's later career was losing the role of Mrs Beckoff to Anne Bancroft when Torch Song Trilogy was adapted for the cinema.

"Playing Mother Beckoff for five years on stage was the role of a lifetime," she recalled, "and I was really angry when they gave the part to Anne Bancroft. She was just too loud and played too hard at being Jewish."

While Estelle Getty's television career remained supremely successful she never enjoyed the same kind of success in film. Roles such as Cher's mother-in-law in Mask and Barry Manilow's mother in Copacabana did nothing to further her reputation as a film actress.

Later roles such as Sylvester Stallone's mother in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1993) confirmed that Estelle Getty's talents were better suited to the small screen.

She won awards for her performances in both Torch Song Trilogy and The Golden Girls. Estelle Getty drew comfort from the fact that the producers of The Golden Girls had never considered anyone else for the role of Sophia. "They cast me straight away," she remembered, "and I've been Sophia, 'the ultimate mother' ever since."

Estelle Scher was born in New York on July 25 1923 and began her acting career at the age of five in the local Yiddish theatre.

She trained as a theatrical actress with Gerald Russak before joining the Herbert Berghoff Studios in 1943, and supplemented her stage work with various temporary secretarial posts before marrying Arthur Gettleman, a glassware retailer, in 1947.

The couple had two sons and Estelle Getty gave up acting in order to bring up her children. She continued to participate in numerous community theatre productions and was a founder member of the Fresh Meadows Theatre Group in New York.

When her sons began school Estelle Getty started to accept short term roles in summer stock productions such as Arsenic and Old Lace, Blithe Spirit and The Glass Menagerie.

"I wanted to act," she recalled, "but I knew I would have to wait until the boys were in college before I could concentrate on a career. While I waited I used to send the kids off to camp in the summer so I could act."

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Estelle Getty became a regular performer in "off-off Broadway" experimental theatre. "What that actually meant was that nobody knew what the plays were about," she remembered. "One time we were so confused we got the author to come explain it to us and she told us she'd written it while stoned and had no idea what she'd meant either."

In 1971 Estelle Getty made her professional debut in The Divorce of Judy and Jane and went on to appear in various productions, including A Box of Tears, Hidden Corners and I Don't Know Why I'm Screaming, at the Federal Theatre in New York. Throughout the rest of the 1970s she accepted small roles in numerous television productions such as Fantasy Island, Baker's Dozen and The Tonight Show.

In 1980 she met the playwright Harvey Fierstein at a party. "I was a big fan of his," Estelle Getty recalled. "I'd recently seen two one-acters by him so I asked him, 'If you're such a hotshot writer, why don't you write a play with a mother in it?' He went and wrote one and then offered me the lead."

Widows and Children First became the third act of Torch Song Trilogy, which opened on Broadway in 1981. The show was a success and ran for two years on Broadway before touring the United States for a further three years.

Estelle Getty appeared in both the Broadway run and the nationwide tour until 1986. She combined her performance as Mrs Beckoff with cameo roles in films and television programmes such as Tootsie in 1982, Cagney and Lacey (1982) and the made-for-television film Copacabana (1985) in which she played Barry Manilow's mother.

In 1986, at the age of 63, Estelle Getty was "spotted" by a Hollywood talent scout and offered the role of Sophia in the television comedy The Golden Girls. The series, which featured Bea Arthur and Betty White, was a hit in the United States and proved equally popular in Britain.

Critics attributed the show's success not just to the quality of the scripts, or to the performances of the four leading actresses, but to the fact that the storylines dealt frankly with such subject matter as homosexuality, cross-dressing and senility.

Others claimed that the show's success lay in the fact that most of the budget was spent on glamorous costumes for the leads.

"I was the only one who never really benefited from that," Estelle Getty recalled. "I had a terrible white wig, a cardigan and an old handbag and that was that."

It is an indication of Estelle Getty's talent as an actress that throughout the series most viewers believed her to be well into her eighties while she was in fact almost the same age as her "daughter" Bea Arthur.

The Golden Girls ran for seven years. Such was the success of the formula that when Bea Arthur decided to leave in 1993 the producers simply relocated the action to a hotel and retitled the series The Golden Palace. The change went unnoticed by audiences and the series remained as popular as ever.

Estelle Getty maintained that she had never expected the kind of stardom she later enjoyed. She claimed that she had already considered herself a success because she had "achieved a solid marriage and two children".

At the same time she insisted that she would continue to work as long as possible and that her real interest lay in serious roles.

"Sure I like comedy," she recalled, "but I really like a part that stretches you. With Sophia it was almost too easy, I knew the women well, she was partly me and only partly my imagination."

When not performing Estelle Getty was a tireless activist on behalf of Aids charities, serving on numerous committees.